Sometimes the future really is a thing of the past, as in this case with the C64 version of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.
Stylus nominated it for their top ten rubbish video games featuring musicians a few years ago. I think it’s worth it for the state of the art visualisations alone.
Four hours of metadata parsing later…
The initial look of the completed tag cloud compiled thanks to running last.fm‘s data over my music sure ain’t pretty. Thank $deity for wordle, cos they make it look far cuter.
So I decided to start by listenning to the tracks at the intersection of electronic, mashup and folk. This yielded me a strange mashup of some shitty rap and Phil Collins. Well, at least it looks pretty.
At last, the start of posts about my favourite music I came across last year.
I’ve been listening to Kelley Polar since his first album Love Songs Of The Hanging Gardens was reccomended to me by emusic. It was nice, but didn’t really hook me but his second album I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling is quite simply fantastic and this song, Chrysanthemum is perfect.
Hushed breathing over his by now standard ethereal synth and drum machine sounds leads into a lovely intro
One white skull used to be a friend of mine
Two atoms kiss and what a funny valentine
Three more years before you’ll ever see the sun shine
I held your hand but now you’re just a fuzzy outline
followed by the chilling and evocative chorus
Make a chrysanthemum of every human head
Make a chrysanthemum and kill them in their bed
And if you haven’t quite got it, I think the video makes it nice and clear. The album is well worth a try, with a brilliant mix of modern clear production values against a sumptuous 80s sound.
A rather wonderful bit from The Indelicates on the recession and where we’re headed.
You can’t go to rehab cos it costs too much
Truly these are hard times but if they further invigorate the music scene and mean we’ll get more even vaguely political songs then I’m sold.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6f9b7386-afa3-4d7a-9308-6e42c97e6042)
Thanks to various of my colleagues but possibly mostly the rather lovely and ever more missed SJP, I’ve always associated certain publishers or titles with certain songs. This largely revolved around singing Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart when a certain publisher was mentioned (clue: they’re not called bright eyes).
Anyway, I’ve had a lot of dealing with Twilight at work lately and I’d been listening to ELO at the weekend. This therefore means I have Twilight from the album Time stuck in my mind. The album itself is, I think, rather a corker, even if it was only really made as part of a contractual obligation. There’s really not a great video of it, but thankfully there is the epic fan made video Daicon IV made for a Japanese SF Convention of the same name. The video is a riot, containing some frankly ludicrously good animation and references to every single possible piece of SF culture.
It’s a new year so everyone‘s trying to predict the big musical acts forthe year. I hate such nonsense myself but as a prelude to my usual year end round-up here’s a few acts I’ve come across lately that stand at best an infinitesimally small chance of making it big but who I really rate. It must also be said that much as I doubt the odds of any of these even achieving big cult status in a world in which Why? is finally lauded as an indie master in the year end round-ups anything is possible. They’re all British – my days as an American Indie Kid are clearly numbered. This is flash heavy, so if you’re reading on facebook or a bad RSS reader, click-through to my site for the videos and other embeds.
Somewhere in the bowels of my mp3 collection resides a compilation called 524′s World Of Twist made by Konishi Yasaharu. It’s quite mad and a lot of it is just really classic songs given a twist theme (e.g. Istanbul, Guns Of Navarone) in 60s covers by various strange acts. One of them originated as this advert which manages to combine 60s cool, science, scooters, the twist and a kilt into one neat package.
Right, that cements it. After my fourth Misty’s Big Adventure gig I am now happy to say that they are my favourite band in the world ever. I’ve not danced so much at a gig in ages. My favourite song of the evening was I Can’t Take The Time Back or as I originally called it on here:
the amazing song they played when I saw them at the 100 Club (Something about taking the time back)
That blippy keyboard bit at 2:15 or so gets me every time. Their new album Television’s People is out now and is rather marvellous. I’d show you the cover but the lyrics sheet produced in the style of Radio Times is rather more exciting to me.
Some of you have dared ask for a guess at my favourite music of 2008 already. With only Of Montreal and Tim Ten Yen yet to play their hands Misty’s do look like they are in a good position for the coveted number one slot in my year end round up. Although thanks in no small part to my colleague Alister I’ll be waxing lyrical about oddball oldies as well such as the Joe Meek produced Dumb Head by Sharades.
…you’ll have to eat your meat.
Or so it seems on emusic, where after many attempts at finding a solution to the problem of licensing the excellent DJ Kicks series of mix albums they have added a new download restriction – albums where you either download the whole thing or nothing. Reaction in the reviews on the albums has been mostly furious, especially as for one of them (Four Tet) they’ve only uploaded part of a mix. I’m not sure I get the anger myself, these are mixes after all, so they should be enjoyed in their totality. On the other hand it is always nice to test the waters on an album with a single track, and restrictions are always a bad idea unless absolutely necessary.
Obviously the problem behind this is licensing of compilations. I’ve only ever bought a couple of DJ Kicks albums myself, being the rather excellent ones by Annie and Erlend Øye (the singing DJ). I have now whacked the Kruder & Dorfmeister onto my save for later pile, which at a mere 295 albums possibly needs a bit of a prune. emusic may be about to suffer interesting times again now as various bigger players move into the non-drm digital music market, hell I’ve even bought a few things from itunes plus, though only because they took too long to appear on emusic. My two year sub with emusic runs out in a couple of months and I’m still pretty likely to renew, having to pay once every so often for access to a huge library of independent music is hard to beat.
